Review: Calico, Cascadia and Verdant

This video is surely proof of SU&SD’s dedication to board game review technology. In the above video we’ve managed to compress no less than three reviewers and three reviews of Flatout Games’ Calico, Cascadia and Verdant.

But that’s not all! You’ve heard her on the pod, you’ve partaken of her written words, but this video represents the team’s own Ava Foxfort’s very first video review. Everybody, please join me in wishing her a the warmest of SU&SD welcomes.

Ava, if you’re reading this? You’re a gem. A gem we’ve socketed into our crown, and you know what? We don’t feel the slightest bit guilty about it.

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Review – Anomia

Following last week’s review of Decrypto, this week we’re revisiting another brilliant game that had previously been wasting away in the dungeons of Shut Up & Sit Down in a written review.

Anomia might not be the funniest game we’ve ever covered if you were to judge it in terms of decibels, but it is the game we’ve reviewed that gets the most people laughing the hardest the fastest.

Does that sentence make sense? We’re not sure. We just know that this game is ace.

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Review – Unmatched

We’ve got two questions for you. Did you see this year’s Undaunted review? And do you want another great 2 player game with “Un” in the name?

Unmatched is a bewitchingly sexy game to collect, it’s a fab little fighting game, and it takes just 20 minutes to finish a whole game. Unless you include the rules explanation, then it takes just 22 minutes.

Enjoy, everybody!

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Review: Detective Club

Ben: Picture the scene: you are in an art gallery. The curator asks you to pick two paintings that match a specific word. They won’t, however, tell you what that word is. You run off and pick two different paintings; one of a horse, the other of an apple in a window. The curator then tells you the word they were thinking of was “escape”, and asks you why on earth you picked those two paintings.

Welcome to the most unusual club in the world!

Detective Club is a party game that sees 4-8 players trying to match fabulous picture cards to different words. Each round, a different player will choose a word, write it on all but one of the adorable tiny notebooks the game comes with, shuffles them, and deals them out. Can you see where this is going?

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Review: Combo Fighter

As anyone who’s seen us at conventions will know, it’s hard for team SU&SD to spend a day out and about without getting into a punching fight or muscle demonstration.

As such, it was only natural that we’d review Combo Fighter. An expandable, simple card game about kicking bottom, and a glorious team effort between designer Asger Johansen and artist Snorre Krogh. If you like the sound of a lightning-fast 1 vs 1 game that’s more intelligent than it has any right to be, do take a closer look.

(And if you’d like to see more of this kind of thing, check out our impressions of Critical Mass on podcast #84.)

Have a great weekend, everybody!

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Review: Piepmatz

Quinns: Piepmatz is a profoundly beige card game for 2-4 players about songbirds fighting over a bird feeder. Now, I should be up front- this game is not a best-in-show card game, as I talked about in my recent 6 Nimmt review.

But you know what? I think it comes very close indeed. I’ve loved my time with it, and it’s now nesting in my game collection.

Let me tell you how it works. This design’s a little fussy, so bear with me. “Pretty rough teach on this one,” as I learned never to say on podcast #89.

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Review: Fuji

Kylie: Wolfgang Warsch’ gorgeous new game, Fuji, pits players as mismatched adventurers who find themselves on top of Japan’s most famous volcano. But it was poor planning on the part of the travel agent, because right as you reach the top, Mount Fuji begins to erupt. You and your companions will have to race against the flow of lava, back to the safety of the village.

Did I mention that this is a co-operative game? Together, players will either scramble to safety, or burn to a crisp.

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Review: Railroad Ink

Remember Roland Wright from our review of Welcome To? Well, he’s only done it again.

Railroad Ink should be arriving in shops any week now, and that’s cause for celebration. This game of rails, roads and mounting desperation makes its competitors look like amateur hour. The only questions remaining are (a) should you buy the Red or Blue edition, and (b) when can we expect an expansion?

Have a great weekend, everybody.

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